Fleet Rolls & Ship Designs. A Better Custom Battle experience

[TheRealJostapo]

Let me open by saying I love I am seeing so far.  Custom battles alone, given a non-AAA price would justify my purchase of this game.

The one thing that drives me crazy though, is AI ship designer.   Playing 'Britain v France 1940'?   Sometimes you'll be facing down Modernized Super Dreadnoughts (circa 1920), and other times a fleet of mega-Richelieus.  Never mind situations where the same happens with every class of ship (treaty'ish one time, mega variants the next).  It makes for a very spotty experience, where you end up with a 'cake-walk' up to a 'I don't nor can I ever, have enough bullets to win' situation.

I've noticed that there have been discussions of working a Treaty System into the AI Ship Designer.   As a developer, I think that is possible, but would open to the door to more debate...and if implemented too strictly, would do a disservice to historical 'creative interpretation' of the treaties (Japan and the UK in particular).

My proposal is this, a Fleet Rolls and Ship Designs feature.

SAVED SHIP DESIGN

• Has a name.
• Has a class (BB, BC, etc)
• Has a year
• Has a nationality (This value should not preclude including one nation's ship in another nations Fleet Rolls (captured ships, lend lease, etc)
• Has a 'Commonality' value, 1-10.   DD Leader's might have a commonality of 3, while a DD might be 10.   In the case of freaks such as HMS Furious, it might be set to 1.
• Has all the serialized data from the ship design
• The user can use the Ship Designer to create and Save a Ship Design
• All the designs are saved into the same folder with a naming scheme which makes picking through them easier.   Perhaps NATIONALITY-YEAR-CLASS-Name.
• This will allow the community to build libraries of ship designs, which follow (or don't) treaty limitations... allowing the user to decide on what level of historical'ness/meta they want (for me personally, I like historical)

FLEET ROLLS

• Has a name
• Has a year
• Has a nationality
• There is a UI which allows the user to manually cherry-pick ship designs to include.   Including those from other nations.
• This will allow a user to create opponent fleets which:
  -reflect the desired level of Historical 'accuracy'
  -reflect which of the Naval treaties is in effect
  -reflect interesting violations of the treaties
  -reflect interesting transitional time-frames in history (surface to AA cutover, modernization states, etc)

CHANGES TO CUSTOM BATTLE

• Allow the user to disable nationality/date choice, and switch to a Fleet Rolls choice. (Noting, it should be possible to select the same Fleet Rolls for both forces)
• Keep the ship class counts.
• Disable the AI Designer, and with a weighted selection algorithm (using the Ship Design Commonality field), fill out the desired OOB from the Fleet Rolls for a side.
• Allow the user to designation their Flag Ship
• Allow the user to design one class of their Fleet Roll (without saving it, but used for the battle)

STRETCH GOALS

• A way to package all of the above into a single distributable file.
• A way to electronically share these.   This might be a steam workshop thing.   In the interim, something zippable and attachable in forum posts.

My Two Bits (Not to take away from my points above)

I understand you guys are working hard on the campaign and it makes a lot of sense. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the body of work to accomplish the points above ought not be a huge lift; from what I've seen most of the code already exists (except some lightweight UI and serialization code).    I've never been, and likely never will, be a fan of Scenarios in games; I feel it leans too heavily into meta gaming, where it's becomes a puzzle on min-maxing until you win.   For me, the campaign and custom battles are where it's at.    If I want to run a scenario, i'll hop on the web, find an interesting battle, get the OOB and build my own scenario (Empress Augusta Bay anyone?).  Moreover, the experience ought to be more consistent, without the wild swings of difficulty.

-joel